The process of researching, designing, and fabricating a model recreating a 1961 floating sculpture by French artist Marta Pan in a collaboration between the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Cambridge, and the Skissernas Museum, Lund.

September 27, 2008

Cambridge. September 25 - 26

Meeting today with Mark Zahn, Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems, to show him the Crealev Levitation Module that arrived from Eindhoven. We discuss the challenges of floating mulitiple objects, how, if possible, to shield magnetic polarities to keep the objects from clumping together or repelling each other--really (really) difficult!

Another studio visit with Enno Lenzmann about composing our soundwork derived from the geometric flow of the original "Sculpture flottante." We will begin with a small-scale model I fabricate working from my photographs taken at the Kröller-Müller Museum.

Katharine and I touch base on her meeting with Charles Marshall, evolutionary biologist at Harvard, to talk about camouflage and iridescence. A very successful example of camouflage, Katharine learned, is the okapi, whose dirt-colored fur is striped, like a zebra. The mind doesn't connect this combination of color and pattern, which helped the okapi to remain undiscovered until the 1950s. Discussing our thoughts for the gallery installation of the Floating Sculpture 08, Charles observed that our project is like evolution itself because we want "camouflage to hide from predators but not so perfectly that the 'animal' is incapable of finding a mate."

Katharine meets later today with Mike Tarkanian, DMSE Technical Instructor, about CAD instruction and casting with beautiful iridescent films, samples of which we received from Eric Baer's laboratory at Case Western University through an introduction from DMSE Professor Michael Rubner. Case Western graduate student, Mike Ponting, has been our very generour liaison. http://clips.case.edu/